Iggleheim’s Ark
Iggleheim’s Ark is a cautionary fable written in the tradition of tales such as those of Aesop and La Fontaine. It tells the story — intermittently — of Count von Iggleheim who read a prediction that the world would be engulfed by a limitless flood on 20th February, 1524. In the face of apocalypse, he commanded the construction of a three storey ark on the Rhine. This proved overly-popular with the local populace, some of whom stormed the ark on the appointed day in the hope of saving themselves and tossed the poor Count overboard. This much seems to be true enough.
My sequence of poems, however, embroiders liberally on this tale, imagining that the Count chooses to save his precious collection of paintings rather than his human subjects. And the focus is, as one might expect in the story of an ark, on the images of animals depicted in the paintings. The point being that we are getting to a stage in our apparently relentless march towards apocalypse when all that will remain to us of Earth’s animals will be the visual representations of them.
Many of the poems in the sequence, then, are responses to Renaissance paintings, although I have thrown in a few by Theodore Rousseau and Franz Marc for good measure. Others use the frame of the Count’s story to think a little about painting itself and representation more generally. Often, I hear it stated that it would be better if poem and painting or photograph could be presented side by side. Issues of cost are often cited to excuse publishers from this burden. But if I had gone down this route I would, in a way, have subverted one of the points of the sequence as a whole. Which is a critique of our constant recourse to visual re-presentation at the expense of the real. As it is, all the paintings are available to interested readers at the click of a computer button. And therein lies our joy and our despair. Personally, I visited none of the paintings in question except via my computer. Lockdown was one of the imperatives here. Nevertheless, I can’t help feeling that I too probably merit Count von Iggleheim’s fate.